Six years after the NAACP staged its symbolic burial, that word has proved rumors of its demise
greatly exaggerated.

In just the past few weeks we’ve had the following: Richie Incognito, a white player for the
Miami Dolphins, tags a black teammate, Jonathan Martin, with that epithet and black players defend
the white guy because he’s an “honorary” brother; Matt Barnes of the Los Angeles Clippers tweets
the word in criticizing his teammates and says people who have a problem with that should “get used
to it”; Trent Williams, a black player for Washington’s professional football team (speaking of
racial slurs) is accused of using the word against Roy Ellison, a black referee, a charge Williams
denies.

Then it gets worse. The mushrooming controversies prompt two African-American NBA analysts,
Charles Barkley and Michael Wilbon, to defend their usage of the N-word. And it’s not just the
jockocracy, either. Last week in
The New York Times, celebrated social critic Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is African-American,
made the old “context” argument; i.e., it’s OK if we say it, but it’s not OK if you say it. In
defending the N-word as an “in-word” Coates noted how some women will jokingly call other women by
a misogynistic term or some gay people will laughingly use a homophobic slur in talking with or
about one another.

Some of us would say that’s not such a good look, either. Some of us think there is cause for
dismay when women, gay people or any put-upon people adopt the terminology of their oppressors as
self-definition.

But the larger point is this: so what? Like it or not, the N-word is not like the words used to
denigrate women and gay people or, for that matter, Italian, Irish or Jewish people, simply because
the experiences those peoples endured in this country do not compare with those of
African-Americans.

The N-word is unique. It was present at the act of mass kidnap that created “black America,” it
drove the ship to get here, signed the contracts at flesh auctions on Southern ports as mother was
torn from child, love from love and self from self. It had a front-row center seat for the acts of
blood, rape, castration, exclusion and psychological destruction by which the created people were
kept down and in their place. The whole weight of our history dictates that word cannot be used
except as an expression of contempt for African-Americans. The only difference when a Matt Barnes
or Ta-Nehisi Coates uses it is that the contempt is black on black.

Context? That argument grows more threadbare every time it’s made. It may also be growing
less effective in cowing white people of good will. As reporter Richard Prince recently noted in
his online “Journal-isms” column, a number of white journalists have refused to be silenced on
this. That includes Mike Wise of
The Washington Post, who wrote a brave piece confronting those who would deny him the
right to be concerned because of his race.

“That doesn’t work for me,” he said. “I deserve a seat at this table. This is about the world my
3-year-old is going to live in.” Indeed, it is about the world all our children will inherit.
African-Americans are not walled off from that world, cannot commit this sin of self-denigration in
our little corner of existence and command everyone else to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t
matter.

Our stubborn insistence otherwise speaks volumes. As does the fact that some so determinedly
defend the indefensible. How can we require others to respect us when this word suggests we don’t
respect ourselves?

So burying the N-word, well-intentioned as it was, turns out to have been fruitless. Something
in some of us seems to need this word. And to agree with it.